New Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze details defrost

The latest issue of Official Nintendo Magazine has a ton of new information in it for the upcoming Donkey Kong Country Tropic Freeze. There’s also a new interview with Michael Kelbaught and Kensuke Tanabe.

Tropical Freeze may be a 2D platformer with separate stages just like all platformers before it but Retro have made efforts to make the game feel more likely a continuing story. Levels will change and evolve depending on what you do in previous levels. One example early in the game  is a level with a hurricane, the subsequent level is partially on fire due to the lightning storms and destruction from before. You’ll also be able to take multiple routes through levels and each world has three secret levels.

You’ll be able to show off your runthroughs of levels too by sharing full level replays to Miiverse. It was previously announced that this feature would be coming to Mario Kart 8 but it looks like Donkey Kong will be the first title out the door with the feature.

The interview with President and CEO of Retro, Michael Kelbaugh and Nintendo’s Kensuke Tababe also reveals not only some more details on the game but some history between the two. While Tanabe is naturally proud of the game he does say he wishes there was more that could be done with the animal buddies in the game, we assume that there’s a bunch more in the game this time around. Retro has been working on Tropical Freeze the same time they worked on the levels for Mario Kart 7 – it’s been in progress a while.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze will keep the somewhat harsh difficulty that the original Wii game had. However casual players will be able to use Funky’s Shop and other methods to make things easier for the more casual player.

There’s also a neat piece of history in the interview, both Kelbaugh and Tanabe worked on the original Donkey Kong Country. Kelbaugh was uncredited on the original game while he worked at Nintendo of America and Tanabe worked on the Japanese localisation of the game. They never met and until ten years later Kelbaugh became the President of Retro. Tanabe saw that Kelbaugh had a Donkey Kong Country jacket and they learned about each others roles in the game. When the two began working on Donkey Kong Country Returns they codenamed the title F8 – fate.

Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze is out in Australia on February 23rd.

Source ONM, via: NeoGAF